Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, Part 6

This is my sixth post on Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. 

Part1 was on the landscape theme. 

Part 2 a photo essay of the New Mexican landscape.  

Part 3 a photo essay of the actual Cathedral referred to in the novel.  

Part 4 on the civilizing effect of Catholicism.    

Part 5 on the reform of the Church from the old order.  

The fourth of the themes is perhaps a bit more difficult to articulate. It deals with the relationship not between Catholics in the novel but between the Catholics and the indigenous people, the various Indian tribes. It’s difficult to articulate because the relationships are varied. There is the relationship of power and domination as seen in the relationship of Fray Baltazar with the natives of Ácuma. Baltazar and the rebellion against him represent the subjugation and revolts that are part of the historical background. In contrast there is the relationship between Latour and the Navahos, as Latour does what he can to save them from slaughter. This theme of relationship is also difficult to articulate because the indigenous people present an enigma to the Catholics. And so the Catholics don’t quite know how to relate with the indigenous people.

We do know that the Catholic clergy are partly there to evangelize. And though the novel doesn’t allude to any forced conversions, if they had occurred they were thing prior to Latour. The process for Latour’s and Vaillant’s evangelization, like good Jesuits that they are, is to live among the people and merge cultures. Accept their culture, give them the dignity they deserve as human beings, while getting the natives to learn and accept Catholic culture. So here is an attempt of articulating this theme: the interaction of Catholics and Indians from which both cultures assimilate while preserving their respective identities.

While for the most part the indigenous are hardworking, family people that any Catholic religious can appreciate, there is a dark side to the indigenous culture that Latour, and, indeed, even the original Spanish Catholic missionaries, found abhorrent. There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the Spanish missionaries made much evangelical progress with the native population in New Mexico. It seems as if two antithetical camps were formed, a Spanish-American group, sometimes called Mexican, and the native Indians. Though they lived side by side, there is a tension between the two which would occasionally flare up into violence, but for the most part the two lived in their own cultural spheres. Fr. Martinez articulates this dichotomy to Latour early in Latour’s bishopric.

"You are a young man, my Bishop," he went on, rolling his big head back and looking up at the well-smoked roof poles. "And you know nothing about Indians or Mexicans. If you try to introduce European civilization here and change our old ways, to interfere with the secret dances of the Indians, let us say, or abolish the bloody rites of the Penitentes, I foretell an early death for you. I advise you to study our native traditions before you begin your reforms. You are among barbarous people, my Frenchman, between two savage races. The dark things forbidden by your Church are a part of Indian religion. You cannot introduce French fashions here." (p.147)

While Martinez articulates the dichotomy, he also suggests an assimilation. The problem is that his assimilation is a compromise of Catholic values. He is assimilating toward the dark customs of the native people. What are these dark customs? Latour realizes these customs while traveling about with Jacinto, an Indian who helps him translate. One night by the campfire we see Latour understand.

The two companions sat, each thinking his own thoughts as night closed in about them; a blue night set with stars, the bulk of the solitary mesas cutting into the firmament. The Bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn't think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him. A chill came with the darkness. Father Latour put on his old fur-lined cloak, and Jacinto, loosening the blanket tied about his loins, drew it up over his head and shoulders.

"Many stars," he said presently. "What you think about the stars, Padre?"

"The wise men tell us they are worlds, like ours, Jacinto."

The end of the Indian's cigarette grew bright and then dull again before he spoke. "I think not," he said in the tone of one who has considered a proposition fairly and rejected it. "I think they are leaders--great spirits."

"Perhaps they are," said the Bishop with a sigh. "Whatever they are, they are great. Let us say Our Father, and go to sleep, my boy." (p. 92-93)

What you see here are two worldviews come into contact, and yet come together. Jacinto hasn’t rejected his world view, but he does recite the Our Father. In fact that whole chapter is a wonderful coming together and acceptance of each other. Latour doesn’t require Jacinto to reject his worldview, but he is able to meet Jacinto on a human level, and in so doing Jacinto admires Latour. Later Latour is invited to sit in Jacinto’s home and have dinner with Jacinto’s wife and child, an infant who is ailing.

The Bishop bent his head under the low doorway and stepped down; the floor of the room was a long step below the door-sill--the Indian way of preventing drafts. The room into which he descended was long and narrow, smoothly whitewashed, and clean, to the eye, at least, because of its very bareness. There was nothing on the walls but a few fox pelts and strings of gourds and red peppers. The richly coloured blankets of which Jacinto was very proud were folded in piles on the earth settle,--it was there he and his wife slept, near the fireplace. The earth of that settle became warm during the day and held its heat until morning, like the Russian peasants' stove-bed. Over the fire a pot of beans and dried meat was simmering. The burning piñon logs filled the room with sweet-smelling smoke. Clara, Jacinto's wife, smiled at the priest as he entered. She ladled out the stew, and the Bishop and Jacinto sat down on the floor beside the fire, each with his bowl. Between them Clara put a basin full of hot corn-bread baked with squash seeds,--an Indian delicacy comparable to raisin bread among the whites. The Bishop said a blessing and broke the bread with his hands. (p. 121)

There is much that Latour admires about the native customs. The father, mother, and child situation he encounters here is not much different from the Holy Family situation in a barn in Bethlehem. The humanity present in this Indian family suggests the spark of God in the hearts of all humanity. And we see this humanity in several places with the native peoples in the novel. But then there are also the dark legends. We learn of the ceremonial fire that must be served and the snake worship where infants were to be sacrificed (p. 122). When taking shelter from a snow storm Jacinto takes Latour to a “cathedral” of sorts, a cave where Indian ceremonies are conducted. It’s no coincidence that the cave is described as a “Gothic chapel.” The association with religion and Latour’s later building of his Cathedral is a metaphor. But the contrast is also important. The air inside the cave had a “fetid odour” and “highly disagreeable” (p. 127). And after building a fire, Latour seems to sense something even more disturbing.

The heat seemed to purify the rank air at the same time that it took away the deathly chill, but the dizzy noise in Father Latour's head persisted. At first he thought it was a vertigo, a roaring in his ears brought on by cold and changes in his circulation. But as he grew warm and relaxed, he perceived an extraordinary vibration in this cavern; it hummed like a hive of bees, like a heavy roll of distant drums. After a time he asked Jacinto whether he, too, noticed this. The slim Indian boy smiled for the first time since they had entered the cave. He took up a faggot for a torch, and beckoned the Padre to follow him along a tunnel which ran back into the mountain, where the roof grew much lower, almost within reach of the hand. There Jacinto knelt down over a fissure in the stone floor, like a crack in china, which was plastered up with clay. Digging some of this out with his hunting knife, he put his ear on the opening, listened a few seconds, and motioned the Bishop to do likewise.

Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it. He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth. What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock. It was not a rushing noise, but the sound of a great flood moving with majesty and power.

"It is terrible," he said at last, as he rose.

"Si, Padre." Jacinto began spitting on the clay he had gouged out of the seam, and plastered it up again. (p. 129-130)

The river is “one of the oldest voices of the earth,” secret, powerful, antediluvian, that is pre-Noah’s flood. It associates Jacinto’s culture with the primordial and therefore pre-divine revelation. Yes, Jacinto’s culture has elements of Christian humanity, but they lack the benefit of divine revelation of God and Christ. And so they have accrued these dark legends and, perhaps from a Catholic point of view, demonic cultural practices. Zeb Orchard explains to Latour that the Indians “got their own superstitions, and their minds will go round and round in the same old ruts till Judgement Day.” But the bishop is not dismayed.

Father Latour remarked that their veneration for old customs was a quality he liked in the Indians, and that it played a great part in his own religion. (p. 135)

Latour doesn’t want to obliterate the indigenous culture. He wants to absorb it, and he wants them to absorb his Catholicism. Through Latour’s actions, his prayers, his blessings, his living out the faith, he is trying to plant the seeds of Christianity in this garden that is New Mexico. This is why Cather spends some length going over the Guadalupe apparition and Mexican conversion. The indigenous people absorb the Virgin and assimilate their colors and clothing to the Blessed Mother. This is why we see Fr. Jesus de Baca absorb the beauty of parrots—a distinctly native bird that was integral to the Native American sensibility—and integrate it into his church. Entering into Fr. Jesus’ garden, Latour was surprised at how Fr. Jesus had absorbed the Indian sensibility.

This enclosure was full of domesticated cactus plants, of many varieties and great size (it seemed the Padre loved them), and among these hung wicker cages made of willow twigs, full of parrots. There were even parrots hopping about the sanded paths--with one wing clipped to keep them at home. Father Jesus explained that parrot feathers were much prized by his Indians as ornaments for their ceremonial robes, and he had long ago found he could please his parishioners by raising the birds. (p. 84-86)

The difference here from Fr. Martinez is that Fr. Baca has absorbed the positive elements of Indian life but reformulated them. I think it significant that the cacti are “domesticated” and birds’ wings are clipped. The parrot can be seen as an Indian version that is the dove of the Holy Spirit. And so Latour naturally understands that Fr. Baca’s methods is a model for his mission. He isn’t going to alter the native people’s customs but infuse their customs with the breath of Christianity. We see later the culmination of this theme in the wonderful relationship Latour builds with Eusabio, the rich Navajo leader.